Way back in 2018, not long after I began this blog, I posted about how Donald Trump – in the midst of his first presidency – fits into the established political order. I did so with the help of political scientist Stephen Skowronek. In the 1990s, he published the book The Politics Presidents Make to much acclaim.

Skowronek divided U.S. history into a series of political orders, with each president defined by their position with respect to the dominant order. Depending on political circumstances and their own politics, presidents use their power to create (reconstruct), defend and innovate (articulate), oppose (preempt), or fumble and destroy (disjoin) the dominant political order.

In the previous post, I read Trump as a disjunctive president. I thought he would mark the final death of the Reagan political order. Given his low popularity from 2016 to 2018, and his subsequent defeat in the 2020 election, I think that prediction turned out right.

But then he won in 2024 by about 2 million votes* (see note at bottom).

When a president fumbles the existing disorder and crashes and burns along with it, that isn’t supposed to happen! They’re supposed to be done with politics. Disjunctive presidents stand among our least popular in history.

So, what happened? How could Trump have come back from his disastrous 2020 result?

Joe Biden, Failed Reconstruction, and the Politics of Perpetual Preemption

Here’s what I think happened.

As a massively unpopular president in his first term, Trump paved the way for the next president to form a new political order. Even Skowronek himself seemed to agree, at least as of 2017.

The problem? For the 2020 election, the Democrats ran Joe Biden rather than one of the candidates who might have been interested in creating a new order. Biden explicitly disavowed fundamental change. Instead, he built his politics around opposition to Trump.

Biden ran on preemption.

Indeed, I even predicted this as early as 2018. Here’s what I said:

The bad news is that any Democrat who defeats Trump will likely be a preemptive president who accommodates and incorporates Trump’s policies, just as Bill Clinton accommodated and incorporated the exploitative ‘free trade’ policies and neoliberal ‘welfare reform’ of Reagan/Bush, and just as Barack Obama accommodated and incorporated drone warfare/the war on terror and the neoliberal education ‘reform’ of W. Bush.

Quite in line with the 2018 remarks, Biden was a preemptive president, not a reconstructive one.

Biden built his theory of the presidency around the idea of the ‘politics of perpetual preemption.’ On this idea, in each election, the opposition party merely repudiates the party in charge rather than lay out a positive vision of governance.

And that’s exactly what Biden did. He ran, won, and governed as a reaction to Trump. He made little or no attempt to build a new political order.

As a result, we still don’t have a new political order.

Perpetual Preemption All Around

Biden’s failure to reconstruct the political order left the door wide open to a preemptive president to emerge among the opposition party – this time the GOP. And, as it turned out, that person was Trump himself!

Let’s be clear on this. Biden failed to read the politics of our moment. In most cases, preemptive presidents actually win two terms! Famous preemptive presidents include, for example, Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton. Both served two terms.

The difference between an Ike and a Clinton, on one hand, and a Biden, on the other, is that Ike and Clinton showed political skill in dividing the political order. They formed a wedge of opposition with an overall dominant FDR (Ike) and Reagan (Clinton) order.

Biden, on the other hand, had nothing to preempt! The dominant political order was dead and needed to be rebuilt. Biden didn’t do that, and Trump made him pay. In 2024, Trump ran against the failed Biden system. And he won.

Of course, Biden wasn’t actually the candidate in 2024. Kamala Harris was the candidate. But she didn’t lay out a positive vision for a new political order, either. Instead she re-ran the major themes of Biden 2020, setting herself up as a preemptive president against a political order that no longer even exists.

And so, with both parties setting up preemptive candidates, we’re surely in a state of perpetual preemption.

Can someone build a new political order in 2028, or do we watch this cycle play itself out again?

Or does Trump build one first?

N.B.

Shortly after election night in November, the press widely reported Trump winning by 4 million votes or even 5 million votes. But as readers should know by now, it takes weeks to count all the votes, and Democrats tend to do better with the votes counted last. That happened again in last year’s election. Trump’s vote lead shrank from 4 or 5 million all the way down to where it sits today, which is about 2 million.

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